Point, Click And Review 52 Years Of Campaign Ads

July 5, 2004|By Alessandra Stanley The New York Times

The scariest campaign ad in modern presidential history is not the "Willie Horton" commercial that the elder George Bush used against Michael Dukakis in 1988 or Lyndon B. Johnson's legendary "Daisy" ad of 1964 that fanned fears about Barry Goldwater.

It is the one with Nancy Reagan, in a demure red suit, staring frostily into the camera in a 1980 ad against Jimmy Carter.

"I deeply, deeply resent and am offended by the attacks that President Carter has made on my husband," she said in a tight, reproachful voice. "I would like Mr. Carter to explain to me why the inflation is as high as it is; why unemployment is as high as it is; I would like to have him explain the vacillating, weak foreign policy so that our friends overseas don't know what we're going to do, whether we're going to stand up for them, or whether we're not going to stand up for them."

Even the harshest of President Bush's ads this year criticizing Sen. John Kerry's voting record on defense are not as chilling.

Wives are so often used to soften a candidate's profile that it is easy to forget that 24 years ago Nancy Reagan was sometimes deployed as an attack dog. And it is that kind of amnesia that "The Living Room Candidate," an online exhibition on presidential campaign ads (movingimage.us), was designed to combat.

Created four years ago by the American Museum of the Moving Image in New York, the updated 2004 version allows Internet users to browse through a far richer collection of TV and Web campaign ads from 1952 to the present.

It also gives Internet users easy access to the current campaign's Web ads, which are more prevalent and troubling this election year.

The Web site, for example, has the original version of a recent Bush Internet ad, "Coalition of the Wild-Eyed," which blended Democratic figures like Al Gore and Howard Dean with images of Hitler. After the Kerry campaign and others complained, the ad was re-edited by the Bush campaign to make it clearer that the Hitler images were taken from an anti-Bush ad posted on the Web site of MoveOn.org, the political advocacy group. (The Bush ad does not explain that the attack ad with Hitler's image was not adopted by either the Kerry campaign or MoveOn.org, but was posted only as an entry in an Internet contest seeking anti-Bush commercials.)

The Bush campaign Web site now includes only the amended version, but "The Living Room Candidate" allows viewers to link to it and compare it with the original.

Campaign ads are "mini-movies," as David Schwartz, the museum's chief curator of film and a co-curator of "The Living Room Candidate," put it: They do not just deliver the message of the moment but also reflect the mood and tastes of their era.

The ads for John F. Kennedy's 1960 campaign are very much of their time -- cinema veritM-i-style glimpses of the candidate explaining his positions to admiring crowds. But one ad is more unusual: Jacqueline Kennedy asking viewers in Spanish to vote for her husband: "Que viva Kennedy!" Jacqueline Kennedy's accent was quite good, but her voice was as breathy in Spanish as it was in English.

The Web site has a search option, so that users can search for the word "sex" from 1952 to 2004. It does not come up, though Bob Dole did mention Paula Jones' sexual harassment lawsuit in a 1996 attack ad against Bill Clinton.

This year's ads are far fiercer and more negative than those from 2000. Then, one Al Gore ad showed the vice president politely endorsing his opponent's views: "George Bush and I actually agree on accountability in education." And reflecting the spread of the Internet, MTV, cable TV news crawls and other attention-dividing forms of communication, today's ads cram much more information into ever shorter spaces. A seemingly soft and fuzzy Kerry ad titled "Optimists" uses split screens and quick cuts to flash a wide array of issues, from jobs and education to health care and national defense.

But it is remarkable how unoriginal so many of today's high-tech, tightly honed ads really are.

A 2004 Bush ad called "Defense," specially made for Florida voters, shows a sepia-tinted battleground. As the narrator lists weapons that Kerry voted against -- "Apache helicopters, C-130 Hercules and F-16 fighter jets, components of which are all built here in Florida" -- tanks and missiles vanish through the magic of computer graphics. The ad ends with the image of a forlorn-looking soldier and a voice intoning, "Kerry even voted against body armor for our troops on the front line of the War on Terror."

In 1972, the Nixon campaign ran an ad about Sen. George McGovern's proposed defense cuts. As a narrator warned -- "He would cut the Marines by one-third, the Air Force by one-third. He'd cut Navy personnel by one-fourth" -- a hand swept toy soldiers and miniature tanks and ships off the screen.